


hunger makes me

by endquestionmark



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 03:46:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8874532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: If Ellie has to share her body with the enemy, and let it turn her into something new and strange and terrible, then she wants a little more in exchange. She wants to look like it; she wants eyeshine, teeth and claws.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Everybody is of age. There are condoms after the apocalypse. In my defense there apparently is penicillin as well so we do have some precedent on that count. There is _definitely_ Dinty Moore after the apocalypse.

Out beyond the nowhere town’s torn-up perimeter fence, a few miles into the woods, they find a big house. It smells of sweet woodrot and when the planks of the hallway give a little underfoot, they do so in silence; the wood is soft with dampness and age. Joel looks at her before stepping inside, and she nods. It won’t last — nothing manmade ever does, overtaken by the green and the rain — but the air tastes clean, earthy, like leaf litter. Cordyceps always reminds Ellie of old burnt rubber, a little, something inorganic and wrong about the smell. She can hear the wind pick up, a little, as the sun begins to slip towards the horizon, and it carries the faint mustiness of old fabric, the sharp crisp scent of pine resin, nothing but the exhalation of an old structure giving in to time at long last.

The house settles as she makes her cautious way through, one foot in front of the other, sinking a little closer to the sassafras brush and bunchberry. It doesn’t feel dangerous at all, just tired; one day the girders under the floor will give, splinter like soaked-through pinewood, and the entire house will slump into the forest. From there, it will be a matter of months before the walls are subsumed by the earth, and years before the glass of the remaining windows is trodden into the ground and washed away by summer storms. Decades after that, the foundation will still stand. As Joel makes his way through the rooms on the ground floor, Ellie opens the basement door, one hand on the wall and the other on her knife, and peers into the cool darkness below.

Nothing is moving; she holds still and listens for a harsh vocalization, but after a moment of silence, she takes a wary step down, and then another.

The stones of the foundation are sound. Light is beginning to come through — it must be an older house than Ellie had guessed, to have stone instead of cinderblocks for its roots, vines pushing through at ground level instead of seamless concrete — but the space is almost empty besides those few dusty rays. A few bundles of roots, hanging from the ceiling; shelves of empty jars; a tool bench, scarred by blades and left bare: Ellie circles the staircase in the center of the room slowly, but her uneasiness is a matter of cold and exhaustion in an unfamiliar place. Nothing about it tells her that she should be on edge. This aspect of fear is familiar to her by now, like a constant sensation like the hum of power wires in a high wind. It sharpens her focus and keeps her wary; when she rests, it keeps her breathing shallow and her sleep light, and when she wakes it jolts her to consciousness between one heartbeat and the next.

Ellie is well used to the perpetual wariness of being hunted. It comes more naturally to her than any alternative; resignation has never been particularly appealing, and trust has never come easily to her, even after years of practice. She stands in the empty basement, listening to Joel’s footsteps as he clears the floor above — the creak of the stairs, the surety of his tread — and feels small, uncomfortable and alone in the dark.

The only thing that the infection has ever done for Ellie — beyond the agonizing obvious, the certainty that she will outlive anyone she ever cares about someday and the probability that they will die by her hand when that day comes — is make her feel empty, hollowed-out and disembodied, removed from the fact of her body as her own, and that had never been the fungus. It had been the people, always, the fucking people, who wanted to treat her like chattel or precious cargo, to hold her up to the light or keep her hidden away, and Ellie had been a child. She had been tired already, even so young — too young to think about what would come next, even if they found a cure; how they would share it, who they would give it to, how they would choose — but not too young to understand the gift that a well-spent death could be, both to herself and to others. She had been desperate for something more than running and hunting and hiding, to find some sort of meaning beyond survival, some constant beyond fear and loss and the knowledge that the world was bigger than the walls of her school but that she was still too young to know how to live in it yet.

She had wanted to matter, because people who mattered became stories, and stories in turn were all that mattered to anybody. The myth of a cure, the whispers about Fireflies, all of it had been currency. A good joke was better than another tray of rations, something to keep close and pass on one day in exchange for a smile, a laugh, the assurance that there might be something to life other than sheer brutish persistence; that a meaningful death might be possible after all, that it might count for something more than the weight of a thousand tomorrows, all lost in a single moment. So Ellie had wanted to matter, and then she had wanted to simply stop — no more fighting, no more killing, no more death for her sake — and leave the world a slightly better place, one way or another.

She hadn’t been wrong, worst of all. Ellie knows that; she had been a child, but she had been right enough, given what she knew of the world and how long she had lived in it. Not at all, by that point, so not very much, but the world had been newer then, and its scale had seemed like a personal challenge — something to be surmounted, to be overcome — rather than a simple fact.

After the hospital, mud on her knees and loosestrife petals crushed into her palms, Ellie had known that something had gone, something had been undone beyond any hope of repair; if she turned back, she would find only ash and dust, some opportunity lost forever. _Swear to me,_ she had said, and she couldn’t tell if Joel was lying, but the way he exhaled, the way he set his shoulders; he looked as if he had been expecting the question, and dreading it. He looked as if he knew what she meant, what she wanted to know — was this it, and was there anything more they could do, however slim the odds and however hard the road — and Ellie, too, knew that there was only one answer he could give, no matter what the truth was. She could have asked him to lie; instead, she waited for the half-breath it took him to answer, and understood that they had both agreed: from then, there was no going back.

Years of forward momentum later — more than Ellie can really understand, for how quickly the time has passed; next season will be fall and pine smoke and then after that the soughing of snow through the silver birch as they go south, until the tree line fades into kudzu and mimosa, and then the gradual encroachment of new growth will drive them once more towards the sea, salt marshes and cordgrass and sedge — the world seems smaller, and Ellie no longer takes its vastness for granted. The space between encampments, quarantine zones and survivor settlements and hunter territory, seems to be shrinking. Sometimes Ellie wonders what she would do if the wild places were to fade away entirely, overlaid by concrete and steel. She thinks that she would go with them, if she could.

Ellie still dreams, sometimes, of that first night outside the walls; the rain soaking through her sneakers, only steps outside of safety but so much sweeter for it already, and the darkness stretching out ahead of her like eternity. Her vision is better now. Even when the sky is moonless and covered in cloud Ellie can see rough shapes, blurred outlines laid out ahead of her like a topographic map. Joel thinks it has something to do with her immunity, and the fungus that lives in her brain stem. _If you can't beat 'em, may as well join 'em_ , he says.

Join who, Ellie wants to ask, beat who? If by _them_ he means _her_ , she doesn't see the point. All the fungus knows how to do is spread, and all she knows how to do is fight; neither of them seem to have any plans to give up any time soon. Her immunity has taken so much from her — Ellie still remembers how Riley looked, pupils pinprick-tiny only hours after the bite, when she had rounded on Ellie — and given so little. Heightened awareness of danger is something she could do without, all things considered, and the last thing Ellie really needs is an accelerated metabolism when she can only be as sure of a square meal as she is of her own ability to hunt it.

If she has to share her body with the enemy, and let it turn her into something new and strange and terrible, then she wants a little more in exchange. She wants to look like it; she wants eyeshine, teeth and claws. People look up when Joel walks into a room, because there's just too much of him to ignore. Ellie wants people to look at her like that, as if they don't know whether to be afraid.

As it is, she barely comes up to Joel's shoulder when she stands next to him, all elbows and knees. She wraps her arms around herself against the cold, aware suddenly of the gooseflesh on her arms and the way her nipples are peaked, visible even through her sports bra and shirt, her stubborn body and the novelty of its wants and intractable whims. Stunted by scarcity or yet another side effect of her condition, Ellie feels confined by it in a way that she never has before, even as her body changes in ways that she can't control, can't reverse, though sometimes she wishes that she could. _You'll have tits one day_ , the older girls used to say in the locker room at school, dog tags bouncing as Ellie tried to figure out where to look. She stands in the basement, arms crossed awkwardly over her chest, and wills herself into motion. Her footsteps echo from the stone, the packed earth below and the planks above, as though off tile.

At the top of the stairs, she blinks in the light. The sun is low enough in the sky to shine straight through the windows and into her eyes, and for a moment Ellie is blind. She blinks away the glare, and realizes only then that Joel is leaning against the wall, waiting.

“I’m guessing there ain’t any unwanted houseguests downstairs,” he says.

Ellie fights the urge to cross her arms, defensive without knowing why. “All clear.”

He nods, eyes flickering over her. Ellie knows that he does it to check for injuries, as much an old habit as checking around corners and going silent when he has nothing in particular to say, but that settles uneasily into her skin as well. Joel is easy to read, for someone whose repertoire has only expanded only slowly to contain more than anger and surliness. He looks at Ellie with a certain fierce accord, something she knows she could never put into words; it puts her in mind of the mutual understanding between wild animals who have no quarrel with each other.

Sometimes she remembers the way Joel looked at her the first time she killed a man — blinking muddy water from his eyes and rounding on her as if she was a threat — and Ellie thinks that at least one person in the world sees her as she she wants to be seen. It shouldn’t mean much, but it does. She knows that Joel’s regard doesn’t come easily and, like so much else, seems all the more precious for it.

These days, Ellie’s body is just as much a stranger to her as it was when she first got bitten, although for entirely different reasons. She has change on the brain, it seems, with no way to tell whether it’s for the better or not. She isn’t sure whether she wants to know if Joel’s regard for her has changed, and if so, how. Either way, Ellie is in no rush to find out. She waits to hear what he has to say.

“There’s an upstairs,” Joel says, tipping his chin up. “Don’t seem like the floor will fall out from under you if you want to sleep in a bed for once.”

“What about you?” Ellie asks, just as much a reflex.

Joel jerks his head at the next room. “Pretty sure that sofa will do.” He nods at the cabinets. “And they left supplies. Not much, but it’s a change from squirrel.”

Canned food on the shelves but no tools on the bench; that gives Ellie a fairly good idea of why the house is empty, a few windows broken but otherwise untouched. She would bet there aren’t any knives left in the drawers, either. Everybody thinks of fighting to keep what they have, but not of what they might need if the only option left is flight. The owners must have fought and lost, or fought and fled, and left what little remained of their home to the wild and the elements.

Ellie feels safer in the empty house than she has while confined by any other structure — a loose designation; four walls and a roof over her head, no gas tank or seatbelt — in recent memory. Its story is simple and its shadows few, and its time is almost over anyway.

“I’ll take a look,” she says. “Pick something exciting for dinner.”

The second floor of the house makes Ellie feel lonely, for some reason, as if she should recognize it but can’t quite place how or why. In another life, she might have come here for the summer, and spent the evenings watching for fireflies out the window; she might have spent winters here, watching snow as it drifted between the trees, and — there she comes up short, every time. There, the next step isn’t where she expects it to be, and Ellie sets her foot down with unexpected force. She has no idea how to continue that story, what people do when the snow is a wonder and not a threat, what it means if not scarcity and strain. No wonder she feels hollow, standing alone in a house full of silent ghosts, the hundred thousand secrets of any place where anybody has ever lived, left to dissipate with its structure and disperse into the wild.

She considers and dismisses the room at the end of the hallway, a natural target, and settles on the next one. The roof is mostly intact, and the few patches of sky she can see are nowhere near the bed; the bedding is mildewed, but Ellie can turn that over and lay her bedroll out on the mattress. Maybe she can spend more than a week in one place for the first time since they left Wyoming, get used to seeing the stars in the same place for a little while. Maybe she can come down the same stairs every morning, grow to fit the house and its corners a little, let it shape her in return. Maybe she can spend some time with her thoughts, the ones that itch at the edge of her awareness when she needs to focus or is trying to sleep, and figure out which are impulses — the whims of her unmanageable body — and which are her own, once removed from the context of her immunity and her uniqueness, and simply too disquieting to consider by the light of day.

Downstairs again, they eat in silence as the sun sinks between the trees, leaving the sky washed-out blue at the horizon and rapidly deepening above. Ellie remembers when she did the talking for both of them, asking questions about what it was like before everything went to shit, pressing Joel for stories about anything but himself; what it was like to go shopping without counting squares on a ration card, what it was like to drive into the city on a weekend and see so many people in one place, walking and laughing and living. Joel is less quiet than he used to be — has gotten used to doing a little more of the heavy lifting, unlearning his old habits of silence, although she can tell it doesn't come naturally to him — and Ellie thinks that he might be trying to fill the space, give her what he can in the only way he knows, and the only way that matters. He asks questions, too, though most of them seem to come with hidden meanings, and Ellie can't always guess at what Joel is trying to say.

It used to annoy her more than it should, but they have more than enough secrets between them, enough they can't quite talk about without acknowledging just how wrong it should be. The first time Ellie killed a man with her bare hands, held on until he stopped kicking; the way Joel looked almost proud afterwards; the first time they set up an ambush of her own, and he had told her to play wounded. Ellie had wondered why he seemed so unwilling to let her take a rifle and find a vantage point. Watching Joel in action, the way he moved — almost too quick to follow, almost too brutal to watch, although she hadn't looked away once — she thought she understood. There had been no immediate necessity to the ambush, none of the instant calculus of survival involved in the choice to kill or be killed. It had involved all the unrefined violence of natural predation, the inevitability of a carnivore picking off its subordinates on the food chain, but combined it it with a sort of inventive cruelty Ellie thought must only be attainable by humans.

Given what she knows of his past and what he considers best left unsaid, odds are good that when Joel reverts to questions, he can’t come up with any more stories to tell without digging up some of those old bodies. Once, years ago, Ellie would have gone quiet and left it at that. With more blood on her hands than she cares to think about, she thinks that it might be a lost cause to pretend otherwise anymore.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Joel rattles his spoon around the empty can one last time and leans back. Beef stew, according to the label; it doesn’t taste like anything Ellie is familiar with, but it could be worse. She swipes her finger over the peeled-back lid.

“Just thinking about that chipmunk,” she says. “The one that—”

“Tried to steal my shoes,” Joel says. “Should’ve guessed.”

Ellie grins. “I liked him.”

“‘Course you did.” He rolls his eyes. “Bet you would’ve helped him if you could.”

“He seemed to be doing okay.” The edge of the can bites into her finger. “Fuck!”

Joel starts forward before Ellie even pulls her hand away. Blood drips from the pad of her finger, sliced open in a neat arc, and wells up almost immediately when she wipes it off on her jeans. “Don’t—“ he says, as Ellie sticks it in her mouth. “Ellie!”

“What?” She wraps her finger in the hem of her shirt, tight enough that it throbs in time with her pulse. “I’ll be fine!”

“When you get an infection and I have to cut your arm off, don’t go looking for sympathy from me.”

Ellie peels the fabric back a little. It sticks, blood already congealing, and she scowls and pulls it off the rest of the way. Her finger is beginning to sting, the persistent itch of a healing scrape. “Like you would,” she says. “It would probably give me superpowers, anyway. Boom!” She raises her hands. “That’s how it works, right?”

That gets a half-smile from Joel, as if he doesn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused. He smiles more often these days, but still looks as if he’s trying to get the hang of it. “You tell me.”

She lowers her hands and yawns. “Sure,” she says. “You’ll be the first to know. Think I’ll turn in.” It strikes Ellie, suddenly, that this is unfamiliar too; usually she falls asleep in place, on a sofa or in the passenger seat of their latest vehicle, without any need to announce it. She hesitates for a moment. “You?”

Joel looks just as thrown. “Might stay awake a little longer.” He nods at the windows. “Keep an eye open for lights, see if anybody else is out there.” He catches her eye and adds: “No need for you to lose sleep over it. Go on. I’ll be fine.”

Of course Joel will be fine; Ellie knows that, because he was fine long before she was around to watch his back, and if the day ever comes when she isn’t around she has no doubt that he will — at the very least — survive. Sometimes she wonders if he even knows how to do anything else, if the alternatives have ever occurred to him; Ellie doubts it. After so long, it must seem like the only way to honor his actions, his choices, what Joel has lost and given up to make it so far in the first place.

For some reason, though, she hates to leave him alone. It isn’t that Ellie thinks she might wake to find him gone or any of that, simply that she knows — even if she left; even if Tess was still alive, even if Riley was out there somewhere, dog tags intact and paint cans jangling in her backpack — that she could never sit with anybody else in the same comfortable silence. Ellie isn’t the new girl at military prep school anymore, and she isn’t the scared girl with a scabbed-over bite who Marlene looked at like some kind of miracle; the first time she picked up a gun it was because Riley was in danger, and Ellie had no idea what else to do. The second time, a hunter was holding Joel’s head underwater, and Ellie had no idea how long she had, and it had been so easy. That had been the worst part: he was fighting, and then he wasn’t, and Joel had coughed up muddy water and sounded, for half a second, the sort of surprised that meant he was proud.

Most of the time, Ellie isn’t lonely — not the way she was at school, when everybody seemed to know someone else and nobody wanted to get involved with the troublemaker — because she has no context for anything but solitude. Joel makes her feel less wrong, somehow, less of an anomaly. They share the same secrets, many of the same skeletons in the same closet, years of learning to watch each other’s backs and sharing space in one season after the next. There is nothing she needs to explain to Joel, and very little that he doesn’t understand already. The two of them, like some kind of rare creature, learning the world anew every day; for Joel, the difference is time, and for Ellie it is experience. He understands loss as someone who knew what could have been, and she feels it as someone who never had a chance to see it, but is surrounded by its shades all the same.

One day her luck will run out. Ellie isn’t naive enough to think that skill alone will keep either of them alive. The world is not unkind, but not forgiving. Everybody makes mistakes eventually, or simply ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and dies of it. The point is: she knows that time is more precious than anything else, in a world returning to its natural rhythms, the cycle of the seasons and the hunt. The point is: she has time now, and hates to feel a single second of it go to waste. The point is: Ellie knows how she wants to spend it, and she can think of far worse ways to do that than in shared silence.

Stretched out in her bedroll, on top of the folded-over covers and the sagging mattress, Ellie can see a few stars through the gaps in the roof. When she turns over, the mattress creaks and the bed frame shifts. There, again, the same restless awareness of her own body; without hunger or cold to concern her, Ellie’s thoughts drift. A few weeks back, when they had stopped in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, Joel had jerked his head at the river. Even in high summer, the last lazy days of fading humidity and endless sunlight, the water had the icy clarity of a mountain spring. “Might take a dip,” he said, and Ellie had shivered at the thought.

“Your funeral, man,” she said, and proceeded to aid and abet a chipmunk intent on making off with his socks.

She and Joel have never been awkward with each other, precisely, that same prosaic understanding born of forced proximity and practice. Ellie had made herself busy by the car, a minivan this time, picking pine needles off the bottom of the windshield and keeping an eye open for the ungraceful movement of any wayward infected. Over by the river, she could see Joel making his shivery way up one of the shelves of rock jutting out over the water. “Want a blanket?” she yelled.

He shook his head. “I’ll be fine.” His voice had only been slightly shaky, so Ellie figured he could suffer if he wanted; she looked at the hunch of his shoulders, the strange sameness of his nakedness, and dug the toe of her sneaker into the dirt. Bodies all looked the same to her at the end of the day, in waxy-skinned death or otherwise, but Ellie wanted to look again, closer and longer, as if there had to be more. As if she could learn some secret from the unbeautiful patterns of muscle under his skin, the punctuation of scar tissue, the sun-dusted spots on his shoulders, to explain what made him; as if there was, or should be, something different to mark his importance, his steadfastness, beyond flesh and bone.

When he had asked, dressed once more, if Ellie wanted to take a dip — _it ain’t so bad if you just get it over with before you have time to think about it_ — she had shrugged. In the half-minute before she threw herself into the water, feet already stinging from cold, she wondered if Joel ever felt like that. All meat and animal impulse, with nothing to distinguish himself from anything else with a heartbeat in the face of a mountain spring, a hundred-year-old tree, the swell of a late summer storm.

Ellie stares at the stars, the faint blue pine-haze coming up from the horizon like one last exhalation before sleep. All meat, she thinks, rolling onto her side and sneaking a hand into her jeans; maybe that explains it. Maybe that makes it just another symptom of her immunity, another side-effect that she has no way to set into the context of an ordinary body, an ordinary life: all the heat and hunger, the way her mouth goes dry sometimes, when Joel boosts her into a tree to get a better look at the road ahead. The effortless sturdiness of him, fingers interlaced into a stirrup, kneeling so she can get a good foothold and then straightening, when she can feel the force that it takes, the raw effort of lifting her; and then, hands sticky with resin and matted with shed bark, sitting on a low branch and looking down at him. _Jump, I’ll catch you_. Ellie, hands wedged between her thighs, turns away from the stars and holds her breath and tries to keep still, careful of her sliced-open finger, tries not to make a single sound; her disobedient body, her wandering mind, Joel’s grease-blackened fingers when their car broke down on a stretch of road next to the Hudson, nudging at what part of the engine she couldn’t see, and the hood propped up on his shoulders. His physical fluency when it comes to violence, the way he looks afterwards, with blood on his knuckles, already blooming bruise-purple, and under his fingernails; Ellie knows she shouldn’t, somewhere in the back of her mind, but the roar of blood in her ears, the frantic thrum of need and ungoverned pleasure, drowns it out.

She comes with a rush, the fierce winded satisfaction of running a downhill course, and it lights up her entire body, leaves her flushed and struggling to catch her breath in silence. Her body, sated for the moment; her mind working to catch up, to accommodate both revelation and revulsion, as Ellie turns her face into the bedroll: it isn’t the first time. Every time, Ellie thinks that maybe this will do it, wear out the novelty and subdue her need, and it always just makes the next time worse, filthier and even more urgent. She licks her fingers clean — slippery-wet and animal, shot through with the salt tang of blood where her fingertip has pulled open again; it blooms on her tongue and lingers on her teeth — and wipes them on the covers. Downstairs, the floor creaks as the house settles in the cool night air. Ellie listens to the faint hum of wind through broken windows, the close hollow cry of an owl, the shifting trees; the room, even empty as it is, filled with the rest of the world. She can feel her pulse in the pad of her finger, between her legs, through her entire body.

Ellie falls asleep to its rhythm, the surge and ebb of blood, carried out to sea by her body’s own irresistible undertow.

In the morning, she wakes sprawled halfway out of the bedroll, driven into the early chill by her own reckless metabolism. The bedding by her face is stained rust-brown, and her hands are dusty with dried blood. Ellie rubs the grit from her eyes with her knuckles and inspects the damage. The cut is clean, smooth edges and raw pink underneath. She wonders if a bandage or a few stitches would help, keep it from opening again, and decides against either; no need to complicate things.

When she sits up, stretches her legs and scratches at the marks left behind by her jeans — crease marks and the indentation of seams, pressed deep into the crooks of her knees, scraping at the insides of her thighs — Ellie notices dried blood smeared up the inside of her arm. The result of reflex, perhaps, an unconscious attempt to stem the bleeding and stifle the irritation of a wound too deep to ignore and too shallow to be bearable; she rubs at the streak until it flakes away.

The first time she got hurt badly enough to need stitches, Joel had been expressionless through it all, rummaging through the tangled gauze and tape of their makeshift medical kit. Ellie had clenched her teeth and looked for as long as she could, but there was something that made her queasy about watching the uneven rhythm of it, the tug of the thread and the way the point of the needle pushed her skin outwards before bursting through. It cost her an effort to turn away too, not to look even from the corner of her eye, but Joel hadn’t budged. His grip on her arm had tightened slightly, but that had been all.

It had been another ambush, a group of half-starved hunters without much cover and barely any plan, but they had numbers and desperation on their side. Ellie had caught an improvised blade — a long shard of broken glass, one end wrapped in leather — on her forearm, through the bite scar that had never quite faded, and the pain had bloomed immediate and warm, but it had given her a precious moment of advantage, a second to twist away and get up behind her attacker, and Ellie had wrapped her blood-smeared arm around his neck and held him still just long enough for Joel to shove the hunter’s own knife up beneath his ribs.

She remembers the wet tearing sound it had made, and the way the hunter had struggled before she dropped him, the way his heels had dug into the dirt and kicked up little tufts of grass, and the fresh wetness of blood on Joel’s hands, smeared shining on his wrists, to match her own. And then his grip on her wrist, the way it had looked afterwards, the places where the stitches disappeared beneath her skin: monstrous, but Ellie had raised her other hand to touch, test it with her fingertips.

Joel had caught her wrist, less careful and more admonishing that time: “Now don’t go poking at that,” he said, and Ellie had felt oddly disappointed but something else as well, looking at the uneven line of it, dark with drying blood. It was new, another first for the list, and she wanted to feel it for herself, run her fingers along the stitched seam and see whether — or how, because of course it did, of course it was a matter of how and not if — it felt any different.

He had picked out the stitches just as carefully, when the skin began to knit together, just as shiny-tender as the deepest layer of tissue exposed at her fingertip. Ellie runs the pad of her finger along the scar on her arm, the smooth ridge of it, leaving faint traces of old blood as she does. She doesn’t need stitches. She could probably use a bite to eat, and a day learning the surrounding terrain, looking for a shed out back with a gas can or anything else that might come in handy; what Ellie could really use is a distraction, some way to wear herself out and stifle her body’s clamorous demands, however briefly.

The woods help, but not much. Ellie takes her bearings, notes the big trees out back of the house and the angle of the sun so that she can find her way back, before heading into the forest. For the first uncertain, zig-zagging mile, she learns the territory: fallen trees, roots torn free of the soil as a single mass, and the distant hollow knock of a woodpecker; saplings twisted to splinters by the storm that Ellie watched from an abandoned school somewhere in Baltimore, green clouds rolling up the coast and wind shaking the entire building; the wispy grey remnants of tent caterpillar nests, like white cloth washed once too often. All of it has some place, some purpose. By the time the sun is high in the sky, Ellie is impatient to see something new, to find something unexpected, to shake her perception loose from its usual patterns and reframe the entire world.

Instead, she climbs to the top of the next ridge — only the tallest in sight until she reaches the summit, and then the next one seems to reach a few feet further into the sky — and settles on the rock there, the exposed bone of the land, to eat. Overhead, ragged black specks drift on the wind, in no pattern that Ellie can recognize. Turkey vultures, most likely; Ellie has never seen one up close, but she knows how big their flight feathers are, how the air reshapes itself around them. She held one while they were following the nape of the Appalachians north, once, stopping just short of Boston, found it drifted in the leaves at the base of a similar rise, and still remembers the way it had felt when she swept it through the air, how it made flight seem so natural a possibility.

Ellie licks her teeth clean and watches the vultures for a while, leaning back on her elbows. They can see her too, Ellie is sure of it, though she can barely make out their outlines; from her vantage point, she can see mountains in the distances, silhouetted in blue and grey, and the line of shadow that falls over them from the clouds above. The world is quiet there, distant and slow, and Ellie barely notices when the sun begins to sink and the wind picks up a little. She has hours of daylight yet, but it seems far too easy to waste them like this; already Ellie wants to rest a little longer, sleep perhaps and see whether anything has changed by the time she wakes up.

She shivers and stands up, tugging her backpack further onto her shoulders. Nothing to see but more of the same, here; Ellie thinks she might be a little more settled as she picks her way downhill, still unsure of herself but jarred back into place by the sheer scale of the world and the futility of trying to throw it out of balance. With the sun at her shoulders, she makes her slow way back to the house.

By the time she spots it through the trees, sweat is pricking at the back of Ellie’s neck and her skin feels too small again. She dumps her backpack on the sofa — no sign of Joel, but his bedroll is hung over the back of a chair, his absence as impossible to ignore as his presence — and throws herself down next to it. The sun crosses the floor much more slowly than it had the mountains, and Ellie picks at loose threads on the arm of the sofa before migrating to sit there, feet planted on the cushions. She digs her nails into the knees of her jeans, where the fabric is faded and frayed, and when she tires of that Ellie looks for something else to unravel and finds only herself. She picks at the scab at her fingertip until she feels the rough edges of crusted blood coming loose, and then pries them up with her teeth, bites at the ragged ruin of it — skin too small, blood too wild, teeth and claws — and she hears Joel before she sees him, footsteps in the underbrush, forest sounds getting louder and more distinct until she can pick out his approach, footfalls light on the floorboards finally as if Ellie has summoned him forth, called him back with nothing but her impatience and the taste of rust in her mouth.

He crosses the room and sits down. After a moment, he fidgets and moves Ellie’s backpack to the floor; when he straightens up, Joel raps on her shins with the back of his knuckles. “Off,” he says, but doesn’t put up a fuss when she just looks at him. “What, were you raised by wolves or something?”

Ellie rolls her eyes and digs the toe of her sneaker into his knee. “No,” she says. Sitting on the armrest, she can look down at him; the shadows under his eyes, the weight of the day on his shoulders, the way he takes up only a little more space than he needs. Ellie bites at her fingertip again and lets the silence hang between them. _So do something about it,_ she doesn’t say. _So now you’re going to get all fussy on me?_

Instead, he reaches up and catches her wrist without even looking. “Stop that,” he says, and his grip is solid and she can feel it — the strength in his hands, his physical fluency when it comes to her reactions, the way she takes up space, her intractable body — and her blood surges, wipes out everything but heat and hunger and instinct for a moment, before it ebbs and leaves her ravenous.

“No,” Ellie says, and nothing he does will matter, because she can see scarlet beading at her fingertip already. The sun is still too high in the sky — none of this is how Ellie expected any of it to go, mid-afternoon and so matter-of-fact, suddenly, so obvious — but she is tired of waiting for a different time, a better one. She is tired of counting on tomorrow. He looks up. “No,” she says again, and he lets Ellie curl her fingers around his wrist in turn, smearing red over the heel of his hand and the raised lines of tendon there and pressing her nails between them.

She doesn’t know what to do — what she’s doing already — but Ellie knows what she wants, and that there is still only one answer Joel can give, and that nothing she can ask of him will ever be too much. “Ellie,” he says, and looks at her as if none of it comes as a surprise, but this time the dread is different. If Ellie had to guess — though she could always ask, always make him swear by it and carry that weight as well; the knowledge grinds like glass beneath her ribs — Joel isn’t afraid because Ellie is asking him for the truth, but because it might be something that he wants to tell her anyway.

Five years is a long time, Ellie knows, even if it feels like the blink of an eye in retrospect. Between Wyoming and the coast, they haven’t always been alone, and they haven’t always been close; they always seem to find their ways back to each other, though, after every fight, every long silence, drifting back. Five years of learning to cut her own hair and to lay her own traps; five years of other survivors and hunters and horrors; five years of never having to wonder if Joel will be there when she wakes up in a panic, and that counts for more than it should. Ellie knows that. They might be too close, or not close enough; she knows he would never say no, even if it meant lying.

She knows that she could drive him away, if she wanted, but Ellie would have to break him to do that — knows what it would be like; the filament of a light bulb, almost imperceptible and impossible to repair afterwards — and sometimes, some days, Joel is the only thing keeping her alight. The two of them, tangled like cobweb-fine roots: Ellie digs her nails into his wrist, and when his fingers uncurl, she brings his hand to her chest. “Ellie,” Joel says again, and he holds his palm flat, like Ellie is a skittish horse, like she might not know what she’s doing, and she wants to hit him, to plant her hands on his chest and shove until she gets a reaction.

“What,” Ellie says, and thinks she could be furious, if she worked up to it for a second. “Do you need a map?” She meets his eyes. “Fuck you,” she says, because her second is up, and means _touch me,_ and Joel — too close, not close enough; always solid, at her back, in her blood — knows and does, sensation muted through the fabric of her shirt, but Ellie is still getting the hang of desire. She knows that she wants to get closer, but has no idea how until Joel settles his hand on her waist, and then she understands and slides off the arm of the sofa to settle across the sprawl of his thighs. She wants him to keep touching her, and settles on leaning into him, hands braced on his shoulders, so that he can’t pull away. She wants to know how he reacts when she shoves her hips against his, but that seems easy enough to find out.

By reflex, it seems; his grip gets a little rougher, and Ellie wants that, but she also wants to know everything already, to just — skip over the awkwardness, the learning, and get to the part where she stops feeling out of her depth and — have him, she supposes. She tugs at his shirt, fumbles with the first few buttons, but slaps at his wrist when he tries to help. “Put that back,” Ellie says, and he does, under her shirt this time, as she gets her hands on skin and scar tissue, the ugly keloid where she stitched him back together in the middle of the harshest winter she had ever seen, hands bloody and shaking and stinging from the cold. She can feel the jump of muscle, the rhythm of his breathing, and his hands are rough, and she wants more.

When Ellie reaches for his belt, Joel stops her. “May I,” he says, voice too level for it to be a question, thumbs hooked in the hem of her shirt.

“Well, get on with it,” Ellie says, her own voice unsteady, and shrugs off the button-down that she wears over her shirt, lets him work it up to her shoulders and then pulls it off. She shakes her hair out of her eyes. “What?”

Joel shakes his head. “Nothing, ma’am,” he says, like a joke for just the two of them. He lets her undo his belt then, and when Ellie hesitates, he doesn’t rush her — just shifts his hips a little and settles his hands on her thighs — and when she takes him in hand he makes a noise as if he can’t catch his breath, the same kind that Ellie makes when she’s trying to be quiet, the same long tense exhalation. “There,” he says once, when she gets the angle right, and doesn’t say much else, just slides away from upright by degrees and makes a noise deep in his throat before he grabs her wrist.

It takes him a minute to get Ellie’s jeans off, but by the time he does she’s interested all over again, grabs his wrist and shoves his hand between her legs and works herself against his fingers — graceless and eager, too rough even through the fabric of her underwear — until she thinks that she has to jump sometime, looking down at him, knowing that he won’t let her fall. Until she thinks _now or never,_ even though Ellie knows it makes no sense, and knocks his hand out of the way to grind down against him. “Can we?” she says, and knows that Joel won’t say no.

That takes another minute — the crinkle of faded foil, the odd indignity of the condom, the way it throws Ellie for a moment — in the big empty house, the sun low enough to cast long shadows, the encroaching greenery and the voiceless wind. Ellie, in her bra and underwear, divests herself of both, and when Joel meets her eyes, half-distracted, he doesn’t look at her the way she had expected. Not as if he’s seeing her for the first time, or as if he can’t believe it, but simply as if he knows her, as if she already knows everything else he might want to say; and then, slow enough to make her impatient, he guides her down, settles her, hands on her waist and hips pressed flush.

It hurts, because Ellie is impatient and unsure, but she breathes through it, jaw clenched and hands clenched into fists against Joel’s shoulders, because she doesn’t want it to be easy. She doesn’t want it to be easy or gentle or sweet, because nothing worth fighting for ever is, and Joel lets her push through it because he always does. Ellie thinks sometimes that everything is tangled up for her, now, when it comes to this — hurting, or hurting others; blood and anger and the numbness that threatens to overwhelm her some days — but it comes as a surprise anyway when she tries to move, and hisses between her teeth. “Stop,” Joel says, and for lack of another way to express her annoyance Ellie punches him in the shoulder. He laughs, all breath and a certain jut of his lower jaw, as if holding blood or smoke in his mouth. “No, I mean — hold on.” One hand on her hip, he slips the other between them, and Ellie makes an awful noise when he presses against her clit, palm curved up so that she can’t see the way his fingers nudge at her, but she can feel it magnified and clarified by pain and newness.

Ellie lets him get her off just enough that she feels flushed all over, lightheaded with it, and the next time she tries to move it hurts less and better, less like frustration and more like getting used to something new. The way that it takes her a moment to work out how to move, and the way that his half-undone jeans scrape at her skin; the way that she begins feeling the strain of it after a while, the pull of muscle in her thighs; the way that Joel sits up and pulls her to him, and the way it changes the angle of his cock inside her, and the absurd surprise she feels at the idea that simple movement translates into sensation: Ellie wraps her arms around his neck and holds him close and wonders that she ever thought it would be any different.

“Would you ever lie to me?” she says, sudden, without thinking about it.

Joel turns his face into the junction of her throat and shoulder, mouth pressed to her skin, and says _no, no, no_ like a prayer, like a promise.

Ellie cards her fingers through his hair, the ragged ends at the nape of his neck where he never quite gets it right, and he groans. She feels the way it rumbles in his chest, the way he gets one hand between them and the way her shudder runs through both of them, the way it feels so natural — heat and animal impulse — and when she comes it feels like a shared satisfaction, the few moments that Joel lasts afterwards and the way he presses closer when he goes still, the way she wants to leave him somehow marked, imprinted with her form.

It seems as if they should be different afterwards, Ellie thinks, for better or worse; instead, when she shifts — winces a little — Joel looks at her for a moment, and then tosses his shirt at her. Ellie looks at him in confusion for a moment, and he shrugs. “Sun’s almost gone,” he says. “You want to freeze, do it on someone else’s watch.”

For a second, Ellie just stares, and then she laughs. Of course not: of course Joel, who always looks at her as if he isn’t sure whether to be afraid or not, and knows it’s too late either way, sees nothing different. Of course Joel, who makes her feel less wrong — who sits with her in comfortable silence — sees no reason to change that.

Of course none of it is a surprise, and yet the world feels different, new, in ways that Ellie can’t take back and — for a change — doesn’t mind.

Wild and different and wrong, she watches the sun go down and listens to the house settle and feels as if the world has fallen, just a little, into a shape that she wants to explore; that she wants to know for herself; that she wants to thrive in and explore and overtake, a new hunger for a new life.

Ellie stretches, the taste of blood still in her mouth and the ache of exertion already setting in, and yawns — all teeth.


End file.
